The messenger of death
by BloodiedCoreOfHope
Summary: Because what else would he be after nearly dying- a six year old?
1. Chapter 1

Shinichi watched helplessly through blurry eyes as the men in black coats walked away, but he could do nothing to stop them. His body was too hot for the winter chill he felt around him, and yet it was bitterly cold for his extremities. His skin itched and his vision swam. He tried to clench an unresponsive fist, yell, do anything, but the blackness inevitably overcame him as he sank into unconsciousness.

He blinked, his eyes opening slowly, expecting blinding light or something similar since he should be in a hospital (if he was even still alive after he took that poison). Instead, however, he only saw darkness. Heavy darkness that physically weighed down on him. Shinichi feared, momentarily, that he had lost his sight. As such, he was very relieved when his awkward struggles and him slowly shifting around showed a small light. He threw himself ungracefully towards it, eager to escape the crushing darkness.

He landed on his chest, amidst a huge field of grass at least half a meter high. His arms refused to tuck in and push him up, weighed down with some unseen weight. His face, too, felt heavier than it should be, but his legs were thin and weak, he felt, and seemed more ready to snap than be used to walk with. He groaned, but perked up when he felt footfalls approaching.

They were heavy footfalls, that were callous and loud. He tried to grimace but his face was unresponsive. "There's a body here!"

Was that an officer, perhaps?

"Nah it's just clothes, bring them in for evidence or something." A beat passed, and then Shinichi abruptly found himself being scooped up off the ground.

"What do you think you're doing? I'm a sixteen year old!" He squawked in indignation, startling the officers. He was nearly dropped for his troubles.

"Just get the clothes and that animal to the station- I don't care."

A small moment of adjustment later he was being held securely, once more unable to see, but this time he had to deal with the constant up and down motion of walking. At least the guy was nicer than his superior, at least.

When he was finally placed down he got a good look at the giants surrounding him. They had to be at least 10 foot or so- and they kept treating him like an animal, to his irritation.

One of the ladies took that opportunity to coo in his face, to Shinichi's annoyance. He mimicked her coo with a flat expression-trying to show her how ridiculous she was being-, but Instead it only served to make her delighted. She turned to her colleagues, and said "Can I be the one to take it to the vet? It seems to like me!"

Shinichi blinked. The vet!? Hell no. This was taking the joke too far. Awkwardly, he hopped off the obscenely high desk, spreading his arms for balance when he crashed into something while mid air, which had a surprising effect of making him lean forward and almost faceplant to the ground.

He pulled himself up and awkwardly hopped away from the chasing giants. They gave up soon enough, so he was left to trudge, hopping through the cold and wet. The rain ran down his form in strange ways, and his arms wanted to be spread and be overbalancing, or tucked in and at a weird angle. He didn't dare to look at himself for fear of distorted limbs or worse. So he carried on, in the rain and darkness, aiming morosely for his house. He managed to struggle his way there, and finally collapsed in front of his own gate from a combination of exhaustion and the cold rain that pelted his form.

A.N

New year new story. Theotakufan1 was my beta for this chapter, found on the dcmk discord server I run especially for fanfiction. If you were expecting something special, I hope you aren't too disappointed.

Core signing out


	2. Chapter 2

Shinichi blinked himself groggily awake, feeling an odd dampness weighing down on him. He turned his head a little, trying to shake off the feeling of wrong about himself and then he remembered. He had followed some men, been given some poison and collapsed outside of his house.

Outside. In the rain. But this felt warm, and definitely not exposed to the elements. The air was still.

He groaned, his thoughts were spinning in circles. The detective attempted to raise a hand and pinch his nose to relieve some of the stress, but succeeded only in batting his head into the ground with a large arm. A moment of flailing had him awkwardly on his feet once more.

Right, his proportions were completely messed up and it was hard to check what it was that was wrong since most movements led to him falling, due to… He didn't want to say inexperience but it made sense.

So with that in mind, he took in his surroundings. A bedroom of some kind- but it was huge! There was a crow, or raven, or some corvid in a cage outside a window, on a equally large desk it seemed- the window was kind of blurry past that. He frowned.

A desk.

No one puts a desk outside, so that meant that that window was probably a mirror and that he was in a room with a crow. He looked to the side, wary of moving and noticed something he hadn't before. Bars. He was in a cage! And actually- he thought, that would make an alarming amount of sense. If he was a raven.

He groaned a little again, but this time he could hear that it was a ravens 'caw' rather than any human sound. The door to the room chose that moment to swing open- or rather be pushed open by someone.

As they stepped into the room, his heart leapt into his throat. That girl, with a distinctive hair style he'd recognise anywhere; Ran.

He put his head down, looking resolutely at the floor of his cage. He didn't want her to see him like this, even if she was clearly the one who'd prevented him from being in the cold all night- he was still a bird.

She walked up to his cage, and he resisted the irrational urge to shoo her away with his arms- wings, even, forcing himself to be calm. Ran smiled at him, "How's it been, Tori? You were bleeding a lot in the rain, so I brought you in and cleaned you up a bit. I'm gonna get you to the vet later, so be good please."

She laughed, then turned to get her bag from across the room. "What am I doing, talking to a bird…?"

She gave a last smile as she left the room, and it was then that Shinichi realised. She'd been in her school uniform, and was going to be leaving him alone in a cage all day- probably with Kogoro only checking in on him occasionally.

He looked around his cage, deciding he'd better get comfortable, or something, because he was gonna be bored and annoyed as hell otherwise. A dish of water, and a bird feeder filled with seeds. If he still had eyebrows, they'd have been raised.

Water made sense, almost everything needed water. But seeds? He clicked his … Beak, experimentally, and felt sharp edges designed for something other than picking up seeds. Shinichi grimaced mentally, knowing and understanding crows were carrion feeders. It would be hard to get himself a 'natural diet' which didn't make him feel ill after the fact, or make Ran ill preparing it. No way in hell was he moving to the wild, if he had any say in it.

But at the moment, he frowned internally, he was stuck in a cage he could only just walk around in, with water and food he couldn't really eat. He nodded to himself, and decided on a plan of action. Get out of the cage, get to Ran, and maybe get her to realise it was him. But he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.

A few minutes of practicing movements, and he was ready. He located the lock on the cage, and struck it with his beak. It didn't yield, and he recoiled in pain. Shinichi frowned, and decided on a different approach. He carefully pushed his beak through the cage bars, twisted his head, grabbed the lock and _pulled._

It snapped off easily, once he had found the right angle. He would have grinned, if he still had a mouth, but he didn't, so he hopped onto the desk outside his cage and looked around.

Tidy room, very tidy. The bedspreads were a pale whitish blue, and the whole room was done in gentle shades, lending a calm atmosphere to it. The floor was a long way down, and although the window was open it wasn't close enough to escape from.

He frowned, and hopped closer to the edge, only to misjudge the distance and slip off the edge. Shinichi cried out in alarm, and flailed his arms- generating a wonky breeze which sent him shoulder first into the floor rather than face first.

And the floor looked weird, when he was only a foot or so away from it. Like a small sea of fibres, all flattened with the occasional bit of fluff or pen lid. He stared for a small while, entranced by the detail, before he realised something.

Carefully, he stretched out his wings and investigated them. About 3 foot total wingspan, they felt huge and heavy on his relatively small body. Shinichi pushed them down, fast and hard, almost expecting to be sent straight into the air. His wings hit the ground, he got a breeze but that didn't do much. He cawed in annoyance, and raised them higher, but that didn't work.

A few minutes later, he was tired. His wings ached from all the practice and hitting random things they'd been doing. He resolved to give it one last go. He bobbed down, put his wings behind and above his head, and pushed again not expecting much. He shot forwards, and in shock flared his wings and stuck his feet out by some instinct. He landed roughly, but he knew he'd figured it out. Crows flew like that, hmm?

He backed up, and with a few powerful wing strokes he was at the window, and papers were all over the bedroom. He looked back with a momentary feeling of guilt, before escaping out the window and taking to the skies.

He initially was flapping, trying to beat the air into submission, but then he felt something. There was warm air to the right of him, and he could feel the breezes around him and knew exactly what to do. Instinctively, he twisted to the right and soared, high, high into the sky, until the whole world looked like a toy set. Shinichi smiled inside, before looking around as he hovered atop the thermal.

His eyes widened. A few buildings that he knew had red on them were kind of hard to see, and the trees looked weird too. But he could tell, easily, how far away they were. He scanned around, looking for the blue buildings of Teitan High. There. He flapped his wings and directed himself over there, and let the air and his wings guide him, despite how weird that felt to his human mind.

For a few moments, all was well as he flew along currents towards Teitan... Then he landed atop one of the trees near the school awkwardly, and realised something. He felt kind of woozy, and his arms- wings, were beginning to resume their ache after the sudden exertion of flying about half a kilometre.

He tightened his grip on the branch, and focused on the windows. The door wasn't open, and he probably couldn't get it open, but he'd slipped out of a window to get there, so he could _probably_ get in through one as well.

There! It was in the corridor but he knew he could do it. A few flaps later, and he was soaring in the sky, heading straight for the small gap. He flattened his body, tucked his wings in and barrelled through it, crashing noisily into the wall.

Students had parted as he came in, Shinichi noted. Probably to give the huge bird some space. He chuckled quietly to himself, and some people flinched. "Is that bird… laughing?"

Shinichi blinked, and suppressed the urge to just tell them off then and there. He needed to find Ran, and get her to realise it was him! With that in mind, he pushed himself up and hopped swiftly along to where he was sure she would be. Maths lesson.

He reached it easily enough, but soon encountered a problem. He was too short to be noticed, and the ledge wasn't wide enough for him to perch on. He hovered outside of the corridor window, trying to get Rans attention. He had literally everyone else's attention but hers! Even the teacher was more interested in staring at him, than writing more work on the board.

Finally, the aching in his wings grew too much for him to fight and he fell down. He'd only had them for a day, and had flown quite a distance to get to where he was now. The students came flooding out of the classroom, and he couldn't tell who was who. They were all around him- a sea of trousers and skirts. Something set him off, and he weakly flapped his wings in a very human 'shoo' motion.

The teacher came to try and pick him up, and several others, but he was feeling kind of angry. He was about a foot tall, stuck as a bird for who knows who long, and the only person he trusted to recognise him hadn't even noticed him! So he snapped at the air, flapped his wings at them and puffed up his chest. Shinichi wanted Ran, or he wanted no one, because Ran was the only one he could trust to figure out that he wasn't just a random crow she'd rescued.

Eventually, Ran came out of the classroom too. When she saw him, her eyes widened. "Tori?"

The teacher turned, an edge of annoyance in her face, "Yes, it's a bird, Ran. Would you like to try picking him up?"

Ran turned, "Oh, it's just that I named him Tori when I found him outside Shinichi's house…"

Someone snickered in the back of the crowd, "That's probably why that geek didn't come in today, isn't it? Crows bring death you know!"

Ran went pale, and looked at Shinichi in a strange way. Oh no, come on… There was no way she'd believe that old tale. He shrugged as convincingly as he could, and on a whim he decided to try something.

"O-okay. Is oka-ay." He couldn't make the sounds well with the damned beak, but he could try. It sounded exactly like his normal voice too, he was pleased to find.

Ran grew paler, and knelt down to pick him up. He didn't protest at all, going relatively limp to make it easier for her. She looked at the teacher. "I'm going to take him to the vets now- is that alright?"

The teacher nodded, and then they were off. Shinichi found himself lulled to sleep through a combination of the wooziness, exhaustion and the comfortable warmth of being held gently to her chest.

When he next awoke, it was to Ran gently placing him onto a blanket. He looked at her accusingly, feeling the acute coldness that came from being taken away from a heat source. Then he felt the hands that were covered in rubber giving him a pat down. Everywhere. He froze, and looked at Ran pleadingly.

Thankfully, that passed quickly enough. After a series of odd requests such as 'raise your wings please' or 'left foot now', all directed to him as if he could understand, the _vet_ left him alone to talk to Ran.

"He seems to be a fine young raven, apart from the minor head injury he has and a few bruises on his wings. Are you sure you want to keep him, though?" The vet looked concernedly at Ran. "They need a lot of space to move around- they aren't cage birds, and they also eat meat. Road kills the best food for them."

Ran levelled a glare at him. "I'm going to keep him, at least until he's better. Can you just get me some medicine for him, or a care guide?"

They gave Ran one last look, this one tinged with anger. "You better do the right things for him- he's still young," But he did hand her a box of medicine, and pulled a care guide off the internet for her. "Make sure he gets the right food."

And with that, they were sent out of the Clinic. Shinichi once more sat in Ran's arms, less drowsy now, but still very comfortable. He decided to try saying something once more, "Tha-anks. Th-thanks. Thanks." It took all his effort to shape the words, but it was worth it.

Tears pricked at the edge of Ran's eyes, and she smiled down at him. "Don't worry about it." He thought he caught 'shinichi' on the end, but couldn't be sure.

The rest of the journey passed in companionable silence, before Ran entered her bedroom. Her very messed up bedroom. Then the silence turned sharp.

 **A.N**

 **So it's been awhile. But I've been working on this at least once a week, and I feel the small need to tell you all that... This has no plot. Whatsoever. I'm just letting it write itself pretty much.**

 **LadyShadowMage betaed this chapter, and has done a brilliant job of being there for me. So... Thanks go out to her.**

 **I'm most available on the discord server dedicated to detective conan and magic kaito fanfiction, so if you want to get in touch with the community ask me for a link via PM, if you want.**

 **Ah... Please review your thoughts, and any antics you think Raven!Shinichi might get up to. :D**

 **See you next chapter, Core.**


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